


Three-Card Monte

by Mortissimo



Category: Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: Character Study, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-09
Updated: 2013-11-09
Packaged: 2017-12-31 22:34:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,382
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1037153
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mortissimo/pseuds/Mortissimo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Craig Boone is unlucky enough to have three loves of his life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Three-Card Monte

Craig Boone had only ever loved one woman. If you'd asked him the day before he met Carla, he'd have told you he wasn't capable of it, but then there she was. She had little sunglasses on, miraculously unbroken, and her hair was long and floated free. All the little tears in her yellow sundress were meticulously mended, so you'd never be able to tell it was torn at all. She was smiling, as she did so rarely in later days. It was her laugh he noticed first, as a matter of fact, drawing him out of his conversation and turning his head as sure as if she'd had him on a leash. Boone had to stop and stare, and when she saw him Carla had stopped laughing but had kept smiling.

He'd broken his plans and asked her out that night. Even the sickly light of the Vault seemed to flatter her, flashing white off her teeth and gold off her skin. He took her to bed not long after. She saw through the thin veneer of Boone's machismo fairly quickly. She laughed, but not unkindly, as she drew Boone down on top of her, laughed as she cradled his face between her thighs and told him there, yes, there, higher and breathier as he obeyed her instructions. He married her not long after; he didn't feel he could do otherwise. She was the only woman in the world to him. 

It was the first time he'd loved a woman, and it would be the last.

When Boone met Manny, he'd thought the other guy was getting ready to throw down. Vargas couldn't keep his eyes off Boone, and after the third training mission that got fucked over because of it, Boone backed him up against a wall.

_You wanna go?_ He'd growled through his teeth and Manny, misunderstanding, had kissed him.

Craig Boone has only ever loved one woman. Before, there was Manny: Sweat-slick and tawny-skinned, callused hands rough in all the right ways, mouth hard and bitter. Manny wasn't Boone's first kiss, but he was his first fuck, grasping the tacky headboard at the tacky Vault hotel on leave, burying his teeth in Manny's shoulder to keep from making a sound as he thrust into Manny and Manny gripped both their hands around his cock and gasped. 

Knowing he could have what he wanted made Manny a better spotter, apparently, and after their hopeless first few weeks of training they sailed through the rest like it was nothing. Manny knew what Boone was thinking, knew when to hand him a new clip and when to stand in the way of the sun, when to knead a kink out of his shoulders and when to back the fuck off. They spent every waking moment and every sleeping moment living in one another's pockets, and when Boone heard Manny whisper _te amo_ he tried like hell to ignore it because he didn't know what else to do.

Then Bitter Springs happened, and it got a lot easier because neither one of them liked talking much. 

Then Boone fell in love with Carla, an atom bomb kind of love that eclipsed the steady burn of Manny Vargas almost entirely. 

When Carla died, and even before, Boone knew he'd never love another woman. When he told Manny the short, sanitized version, shaking from strain and stress and no sleep, there was a traitorous moment when Boone thought about how easy it would be to fall back into Manny's arms. It wasn't that he'd ever stopped loving Manny, it was just that he'd loved Carla so much more, and that split second of relief in Manny's eyes was enough to bury the last of the embers of his love for Manny. 

So Boone had loved one man, and Boone had loved one woman.

After, there was the courier.

The courier walked up from the dinosaur's belly like he belonged there and dragged Boone into conversation utterly without his permission. He solved Boone's last burning mystery like it was his own, handing him vengeance and absolution on a silver platter, and then invited him along for the ride. 

Boone went with the courier; he didn't feel he could do otherwise.

In the intervening months since he'd lost Carla, Boone had felt nothing but the cold, hard knot of rage where his heart used to be. He'd lived for the night, hiding in his hotel room when the sun rose high and shone the sand the color of Carla's skin with the brightness of her eyes. The courier had dragged him back into the day with pretty words and a razor smile, handing him guns and armor and stimpaks off the dead Legionnaires they pissed off together. 

The courier looked at him the way Manny had, and in defense Boone told the courier about the one woman he'd loved, all about her. Through it all the courier smiled when he should and looked sad when he should but didn't push it and didn't push it, just looked. Boone felt the weight of the courier's eyes like a caress across his face, his mouth. 

Craig Boone had only ever loved one woman. 

If you'd asked him, he would have told you that much, and if you'd asked him about Manny, as the courier did, he wouldn't have said much.

Nobody asked Boone about the courier.

The minutes he spent outside the Vegas version of Sleeping Beauty's tower were some of the longest of his life. Between the smiling robot guarding the gates and the floating robot awaiting its master, the air was full of whirring. If he turned, he'd have been able to see the spot he first laid eyes on the only woman he'd ever love, but Boone couldn't look away from the doors. He fingered his rifle and felt the weight of stares from the gamblers and the whores and the guards, but Boone couldn't make himself move until he saw the doors to the Lucky 38 open as the courier came grinning into the daylight. 

There was nothing but happiness in the courier's eyes when he saw Boone, and when he gestured for Boone to follow him inside, Boone went without looking back. In the elevator the courier wouldn't shut up about what he'd seen and heard, about robots and poker chips and snowglobes. The stream-of-consciousness accompanied them into the presidential suite, with brief stops for _your room_ and _my room._

The courier kept talking as he unpacked, and then as he undressed, his hands shaking minutely, his back to Boone, his head bowed. 

Carla had been golden from head to toe, from hair to skin, her eyes sparkling blue between. She was soft around the edges, in the beginning, curved everywhere a woman should curve. 

Manny had dark skin and darker hair, scalp and arms and legs, scattered across his chest and trailing thickly between his legs. He was muscled without looking bulky, and in the dark he gleamed.

The courier was pale as a child of the vaults, his hair green on his head and gone everywhere else. His body was skin, bone and sinew, all held together by the scars his profession had afforded him. Without the armor he seemed light enough to blow away in a breeze, and when Boone slipped his hands around the courier's waist and felt the skin at his hipbones, Boone thought he might shake to pieces. 

When he dragged Boone into bed he fucked with tooth and nail like a thing possessed. The courier's hands were everywhere at once, on Boone's face and his ass and his cock. Without meaning to, Boone found himself fighting back, kissing back, fucking back. When the courier sank down on Boone's cock and rode him hard, Boone's hands gripped the courier's waist of their own accord and left lurid purple bruises. 

In the morning Boone would be surprised to find he had marks of his own, from teeth and fingernails and the courier's bony knees in his sides. 

In a month he will fight alongside the courier for New Vegas, and they will win, and the desert will bloom under the courier's care and Boone's eyes.

Craig Boone only ever loved one man, and one woman, and one man.

**Author's Note:**

> Obviously this is a No Gods, No Masters playthrough where you're not an asshole in One for my Baby and convince Boone not to be one at the end of I Forgot to Remember to Forget.


End file.
